Yearning for home: A Jewish woman’s memories of Lahore

[Muhammed45]

A fancy dress competition on one of the Jewish festival ,Purim . Karachi 1950's


View attachment 781839

@Dariush the Great
The Jews celebrate massacre of Iranians (purim) in every where in the world. Savages!

 

[Maula Jatt]

utter bullshit



The only entity that is loved and not feared in Pakistan is the Khaki, the other lie is Lahore is home to Khaki. People of Pakistan fear police, judiciary even the water department but always embrace Khaki.

I think propaganda is in white genes. It is impossible for them to write something truthfully.

don't let foreign entities ever disrespect your army, criticism should only be done by Pakistanis
others can eat a d***

 

[xyxmt]

don't let foreign entities ever disrespect your army, criticism should only be done by Pakistanis
others can eat a d***

yes, you can criticize your parents but wont let your enemy spit on their face.

 

[Dariush the Great]

@Dariush the Great
The Jews celebrate massacre of Iranians (purim) in every where in the world. Savages!

I have read that those massacred and Haman were not Iranian but Agagites. They were at the service of the Iranian king.

 

[Muhammad Saftain Anjum]

The Jews celebrate massacre of Iranians

Will you elaborate it more? Plz

 

[TigerOfMysore]

Her second home, 13 Gulberg 5, was now owned by lawyer Raza Kazim, formerly associated with the Indian National Congress before Partition and the Pakistan Peoples Party during its early stages. Through Raza’s wife, Rashida, Hazel was introduced to National College of Arts Film and TV Department Head Shireen Pasha.

Hazel joined Rashida and Pasha in filming the efforts of activist Hyder Ibrahim, who was working to resettle the flood victims of the time in a project called Resettling the Indus.

So began another journey in Pakistan, one that made her return again in 2012 and 2013. “I was overwhelmed. I had found Lahore again,” she says, once again using the word as a substitute for Pakistan, despite working in Southern Punjab rather than in the beloved city of her childhood. “Now I was involved in other peoples’ narrative.”

A narrative of the future, rather than of the past that she had come to find. But the past continues to hold a special place in Hazel’s heart and she shares it with all who care to listen. “I put together a presentation called The Other Pakistan that talked about my experiences in Pakistan and how wildly it contrasted with what we often hear. I gave five of them in the US and two in Berlin, Germany.”

Refuge in Pakistan



Herman Selzer and Kate Selzer. PHOTO: HAZEL KAHAN

The wheels of fate that resulted in Hazel’s affiliation with Pakistan were moving on a long winding road even before she was born. “My parents were fleeing from Hitler and I will forever be grateful to Pakistan for giving us the refuge we needed back then.”

Herman Selzer and Kate Selzer were a young couple studying medicine together when they had to leave Germany, where, after 1933, Jews were not allowed to study medicine.

They made their way to Italy, where they graduated from the University of Rome. But Europe was no safe place for Jews during that time and someone in passing mentioned the crown jewel of the British Empire — India. “My father, who had completed his studies before my mother, left Rome and took a ship, I think from Naples, I can’t remember for certain, to Palestine where his parents and siblings had resettled after fleeing Europe, and then sailed to what was back then Ceylon [modern day Sri Lanka] from there. Through there they arrived in India.”

In India, Dr Herman soon found out getting work was easier said than done. “Here he was just another European doctor and they had more than enough of them. It wasn’t until he came to Lahore that he found a place to start a medical practice.”

In Lahore, the Selzers had their first daughter, naming her Hazel. A son, Michael, followed soon after. But life was to take a drastic turn for the worse. “In 1941, three years after arriving in Lahore, we were sent to an internment camp near Puna because they were stateless. They were labelled ‘enemy aliens’. I was two at the time and my brother was three months old.”



Hazel as a young girl. PHOTO: HAZEL KAHAN


When they were released, nearly years later on August 26, 1946, the movement for an independent state for the Muslims was well and truly underway but Hazel recalls there was little discrimination against her family both before and after Partition. “Everyone was very friendly towards us because we were one of the ‘people of the book’. They knew we were Jewish, but they were ok with it.”

However, having suffered a life of constant hardship due to their religion, the Selzers were not very keen on flaunting it either. “My parents were secular and we only half-celebrated the Jewish holidays.”



Hazel’s parents Herman Selzer and Kate Selzer in Pakistan. PHOTO: HAZEL KAHAN

For more than two decades, the Selzers practiced medicine in first one and then another of their two spacious villas, and their medical reputation spread as their clinical practice grew.

But then the Six-Day War broke out. Suddenly Jews and Muslims of lands far away were enemies.

Pakistan as they knew it — hospitable, friendly, welcoming…home — was about to change drastically. “Articles started appearing in newspapers slandering my father,” recalls Hazel. “They started facing problems in banks and at other such institutions. Suddenly being Jewish mattered.”

Over the next couple of years, the sense of alienation grew and the Selzers were forced into doing what they had never even contemplated. “My parents wanted to spend the rest of their lives in Pakistan. After retiring, they planned to set up a mobile clinic and travel across the Punjab and what was back then then North-West Frontier Province.”

But they knew they couldn’t stay once relations had broken down, with Israel’s War of Attrition further increasing the Muslim-Jew divide.

And so in 1971, with heavy baggage and a heavier heart, the Selzers said farewell to the land that they had grown to love, the land that they were forever thankful to for providing them with refuge and welcome when they needed it the most — once again driven away from their home for being Jewish.

It has been 45 years since then and while relations between the two religions remain as fractious as ever across the globe, Hazel Kahan refuses to let go of the memories of yesteryears.

For her, Lahore will always be “my Lahore”.

PHOTO: HAZEL KAHAN

It is sad, but there is no doubt in my mind that Israel in the long run has made Jews less safe in the world, not more safe. The bridges that these jewels of communities (highy educated and capable Jews enriching their local communities) all over the world (cherished in many places), were undone so quickly. Those bridges and relationships are the truest form of a safety net. Yes this safety net ruptured in Europe, but because White Jews were unsafe in Europe did not mean that they should institute a form of ideology that rips thousand year old Jewish communities from their homes. That is what Zionism ended up doing and over the long term it will hurt not help the Jews of the world.

Well there are plenty of Pashtun refugees ethnically cleansed from first their homes in Pakhtunkhwa and then also from their shanties in Islamabad by the East Pakistanis who know how she feels.

Ethnically cleansed by their own ethnicity, give me a break. Give it up. Pashtun are a core fabric of Pakistan and there is nothing you can do about it. We will thrive and cherish our home of Pakistan and will always be a wall to defend her. Also more Pushtuns live in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world, so I am in no mood to hear about my own story in Pakistan (as a Pakhtun), from others who live or are influenced by outsiders.

 

[untitled]

Will you elaborate it more? Plz

Look up the wikipedia article on the Book of Esther